Style
1
The office currently overseeing the copyrights to the works of Kirima Seiichi, eight years after his death, was in the corner of a low-rent building away from the main traffic of the city.
The office manager was an eighteen-year-old high school girl named Kirima Nagi, who visited two or three times a month to clean it. She conducted all actual business by mail, so the office was mainly used for storage.
There were two doors. The first had no lock, so that guests could enter and wait comfortably. The second door served as the true entrance to the office.
“…………”
Nagi silently unlocked the three different locks on the door.
Inside, she looked around to see if anyone was there, a habit acquired long ago. Of course, there was no one here.
As always, this made her sigh.
She glanced at the shelves of her father’s works, which lined the walls, and headed for the kitchen.
She took out the kettle, filled it with water, and placed it on the burner. The former resident had illegally altered the burner, and it was extremely powerful. The water boiled in no time at all.
She used the boiling water to make a pot of tea. Judging from the stains on the floor, the former occupant had been a coffee drinker, but she preferred tea.
“Coffee is what American detectives drink,” she murmured absently.
She was here to clean, but she sprawled on the sofa instead, drinking several cups of tea and staring absently at the ceiling.
In all likelihood, nobody had ever seen her acting this lazy. Everyone thought of her as frighteningly collected, and she had earned herself the nickname “Fire Witch.” She deliberately lived up to the part.
But in this one place she was free to be an ordinary, listless, apathetic high school girl doing nothing at all.
Every now and then she whispered, “Not yet… still not there…” as if there were someone in the room with her.
By the time she found the office, the previous tenant had already vanished. Everything inside had been hauled away.
She had quickly decided to rent the empty office shortly after she’d turned fourteen. Ever since, she had come here to do nothing.
Absently, she picked one of Kirima Seiichi’s books up from the table. The Victor’s Principle, The Victim’s Future.
“Unfortunately, genuine effort is never understood by others. It is only understood when you emerge victorious, but when you win, the beauty of the effort extended is subverted into something else entirely. The true fruits of effort lie only within that which is sacrificed.”
It was hard to understand what he was trying to say, but then, ambiguity was a distinct characteristic of her father’s writings. Nagi was never quite sure why they sold so well.
“Ah-ahhh,” she said, tossing the book aside. “All my efforts are in vain, Dad…”
Muttering, she stood up, washed the cup and pot, and put them away.
Then she left the office without ever getting around to cleaning. She headed toward the parking meter where her bike was parked, but suddenly she frowned, staring at the garbage area on the ground beneath her.
She saw the battered body of a dead crow lying next to the garbage. It was not a particularly unusual place for a crow to die, but she bent down and picked it up without the slightest hesitation. She turned it over in her hands, examining it.
“…………”
There was no trace of the carefree expression that had been on her face a short moment ago. Her eyes were again those of the Fire Witch.
She stuffed the dead crow into a plastic bag, tied it shut, and stowed it away in her handbag.
Then she pulled out a cell phone and dialed it quickly. It rang once, and someone answered, “This is Habara.”
“It’s me, Kentaro,” she said, using a masculine pronoun.
“Oh! What? Something happening?” Habara Kentaro burbled happily on the other end of the line. He was a year younger than Nagi.
“You free?”
“Couldn’t be freer! What do you need? I’m up for anything!” he yelped, excitedly.
Nagi managed a pained smile, “Right, then I’ve got a favor to ask. Check out the garbage piles around the west side of town and see if there’s something there.”
“Garbage piles…hmm, and what am I looking for?”
“Dead animals.”
“Ick! Why?”
“I’m not forcing you to do anything.”
“N-no, I’ll do it! Sure! Dead…like what?”
“Anything. Just see if anything’s there, no need to bring any samples back.”
She did not bother to mention that she would do that.
“Ok. If I’m on the west side, will you be checking the east?”
“Yeah. Meet me at the usual place on the national road. In two hours.”
“Sure. Oh, hey…”
“What?”
“When we’re done, mind if I eat at your place?”
Nagi smiled her pained smile again. “Hitting on Aya?”
“O-of course not!” Kentaro stammered, flustered.
“Just kidding,” Nagi said, amused. “I’ll call her.”
“Great, thanks.”
She should be thanking him, she thought, but hung up without saying so.
Her smile vanished, and she glared at the garbage pile again. “So,” she said, her eyes gleaming.
2
It had been nearly five years since Kirima Nagi began secretly helping people.
She started right after she had abruptly recovered from the illness that kept her in the hospital for six months. Exactly why she had recovered remained a mystery. All she knew was that her body was healthy again, and that there were several months to go before she could re-enter school. She honed her weakened body by training with an old friend of her father’s, her guardian, Sakakibara Gen. He was a karate expert, and in no time, her physical instincts were sharp as a blade. Afterward, Gen had found himself in a spot of trouble. It was serious enough that he had to leave Japan. When he left her, Nagi felt like she might have been able to save him if she had tried.
That event, along with a few other things, started her on her current trajectory.
When she began only he knew what she was doing, but now she had friends like Suema Kazuko, Niitoki Kei, and Habara Kentaro, who’d gotten mixed up in something she’d dealt with and afterward pledged to help her out when she needed it.
Nagi was doing her level best to avoid putting any of them in danger. She had lost a very good friend in the past because of her choice to involve them in her business. Habara Kentaro, in particular, was continually sniffing around after her, poking his nose into dangerous places. That was exactly why Nagi had begun asking for his help when she was fairly sure matters would not turn out to be too dangerous. Not that Kentaro’s abilities weren’t impressive—he’d taken care of one big incident all on his own.
Even so, Nagi was constantly reminding herself not to rely on him unless it was absolutely safe—or absolutely necessary.
***
“Welcome home!”
When Nagi and Kentaro had finished their investigations and returned to Nagi’s home, her housemate Orihata Aya greeted them brightly.
“Hey, Aya-chan! Long time no see!” Kentaro called out.
Aya snorted, “Habara-san, you were just here last week.”
“Oh? Was I?”
Both of them laughed.
“That smells good. What is it?” Nagi asked, pulling her boots off.
“Beef stew. I was making a lot anyway, so when I heard Habara-san was coming…it was kind of a relief, honestly.”
“You’re so nice,” Kentaro said, nodding earnestly. Then he suddenly asked, “Oh, right—mind if I wash my hands?”
He was off down the hall before anyone answered. He’d been over often enough to know where the washroom was.
Nagi shook her head.
Aya stared blankly after him. “What’s with that?”
“Probably touched a dead cat or something,” Nagi said.
Aya’s eyes widened, “O-oh…”
“More importantly, dinner’s waiting, right? Sorry we were late…”
“Oh, no, not at all,” Aya said, shaking her head and smiling.
Looking at Aya, Nagi marveled again at how much happier the girl seemed. When they first started living together she had been very stiff, but she had opened up considerably since then.
She had originally been friends with Nagi’s stepbrother, Masaki. But a certain incident had left her alone in the world, and Nagi had taken her in. Nagi was only a minor, but she was also wealthy.
No sooner had the three of them sat down to eat than Kentaro, spoon still in his mouth, moaned, “You’re getting even better, Aya-chan!”
“Thank you!” she said, beaming.
“He’s right. Your training’s paying off,” Nagi agreed, once she’d tasted it.
Aya was attending a cooking school. It was pretty intense—designed specifically for would-be professionals. Aya had decided that the best way to plan for her future was to ensure her employability, so she had quit high school and enrolled there.
“But I’m afraid it does taste a little burnt. That’s a problem for stew,” Nagi said.
Kentaro sighed dramatically. “Harsh, isn’t she?”
“No, I actually prefer to have people come right out and tell me if something is wrong. Helps me improve,” Aya said, smiling.
“She keeps pushing you too, huh? Bet it would be a lot more fun to cook for Masaki,” Kentaro teased.
Aya turned bright red. “N-no, I…”
“Shame he’s been confined to the dorm as punishment for truancy. You never see him!”
“Oh, but I don’t…”
“She calls him every day,” Nagi interrupted.
“Oh, she does? Hee hee hee.”
“Augh…” Aya moaned, softly.
“But you do miss him, right?” Kentaro said, insistently.
Aya didn’t answer.
Instead, Nagi said calmly, “They’re better off apart for the moment. Give them both some time to cool their heads.”
“Maybe so. Oh, Nagi, what’s going on with the Taniguchi house? With Masaki in the dorm and you in the apartment, is anyone living there? Masaki’s parents are still abroad, right?”
“It’s empty,” Nagi said, simply.
Kentaro grimaced. “That’s a shame. If his parents come back and find the place deserted, they’ll be shocked.”
“Do you want to live there—look after it? You can take the rent out of your pay. You should end up getting about fifty thousand yen a month.”
“You always were stingy,” Kentaro sighed, then began plowing through his stew. “Mm, this is so good!”
“There’s plenty more!” Aya said, and Kentaro quickly held out his empty bowl.
Despite her complaints, Nagi ate steadily as well.
She felt very much at home.
***
“…corpses at about a third of the locations…?” Nagi said, glancing over the notes Kentaro had taken. They were done eating and had moved to the living room.
“Like you said, a decent number. They’ll probably be eaten by other animals by tomorrow, but…”
“So many different kinds, too…” Aya said, examining the data. “Crows, rats…”
“The garbage areas… the animals would only have been able to feed for an hour or two before the garbage was collected. It was collected this morning, but then why didn’t they take the dead animals, too? Or were they placed there after the trash was picked up?”
“But what for?”
“Hmm…maybe it was just a prank?”
“But if you put dead crows and rats in a garbage pile, nobody would notice. Pranksters would go for something more obvious.”
“Good point.”
“…………”
Based on the notes, Nagi began breaking down the data.
“Find anything?”
“The only noteworthy fact so far is that there are no corpses in the larger collection areas,” Nagi said.
“Ah!” Aya exclaimed. “You’re right!”
“I didn’t notice. Yeah, they were all in narrow residential streets, nothing near big apartment complexes or office buildings,” Kentaro shook his head, bitter that he’d overlooked the pattern.
“But what does it mean?”
“Hmm…” Kentaro thought hard. “Maybe they were poisoned? The poison could’ve been mixed into the garbage. Maybe it was some sort of sick prank…”
“But if it were poison, the bodies wouldn’t be damaged. Instead, they would have thrown up, and you’d see evidence of that,” Aya pointed out.
“Urp,” Kentaro said. “M-maybe the rats got them afterward?”
“Rats would have taken the whole body somewhere safe before consuming it.”
“Urp.” Kentaro clutched his head. “When Nagi first called, I didn’t think this was a big deal, but…the more I look at it, the less sense it makes.”
“…………” Nagi silently pored over the information.
“Nagi, what do your instincts say?” Kentaro asked.
Aya nodded, clearly wanting to know. Both of them stared at Nagi.
“The corpses were not taken away, probably because it was against regulations,” Nagi said quietly.
“Regulations? What do you mean?”
“No, wait…you mean the garbage collector’s contracts? Corpses don’t count as garbage?”
“Oh, that makes sense,” Aya nodded.
Kentaro did as well, continuing, “If you put out oversized garbage, it just gets left there, too. Dead animals are probably the same. That explains why they aren’t left in the big places, as well. Those places would have different people collecting garbage, and it would all get hauled away together.”
Nagi agreed. “Some of the garbage men probably picked it up without thinking. But if they left it there, they weren’t being lazy. There are strict regulations about that sort of thing.”
“So corpses weren’t at a third of the places, but at a lot more?”
“It seems to be a reasonable assumption.”
“Then what is going on? This is happening on such a large scale…” Kentaro groaned. “That makes me understand it even less!”
“…………”
Nagi stared down at the information without answering.
***
At two o’clock in the morning, Aya’s eyes snapped open. The sound of the air conditioner through the wall had woken her.
She pulled a cardigan over her pajamas and left her room. Nagi was still up, examining the dead crow on the table with thin rubber gloves on.
“Um,” Aya said.
“You have school tomorrow,” Nagi said, not turning around. “Go back to bed.”
“Y-yeah…you too.”
“Yeah. Just as soon as I check this one thing,” she said, her hands never pausing. She would be up all night. She always was. She usually slept in class, instead.
“…………”
Aya stared at her back for a while.
After a minute, Nagi turned around. “What? Something on your mind?”
“N-not really. I just… I was thinking that you’re really working hard.”
“It’s a habit by this point,” Nagi said, shrugging.
“How do you do it?” Aya found herself asking.
“How? Hmm…let’s see. Aya, why do you like Masaki?”
“Eh?” Aya said, surprised. “Uh, well, b-because…um…” She couldn’t find the words.
Nagi grinned at her. “See? Not everything can be explained.”
Aya was flustered now. She had only wanted to express her admiration. “…Sorry,” she said, lowering her gaze.
“Nothing to apologize for.” Nagi grimaced, and turned back to her work.
Aya watched her a little longer.
Eventually, Nagi asked, “Aya, would you make some tea?”
“S-sure!” Aya said, brightening visibly. She bolted for the kitchen. “Earl Grey?”
“Yeah. In a pot. Milk on the side. I’ll add it myself.”
“Okay!” Aya said, happily.
Nagi smiled to herself. It was like they were newlyweds, she thought. Or…or she’s the adorable assistant of a worn-out detective…
The role she’d never managed to adequately play. Nagi sighed, covered the dead crow with a sheet, and stood up.
3
“Nagi, what do you think being normal means?” Kirima Seiichi had asked as he died. He was coughing up blood on the floor of his workroom, gasping as he breathed his last.
Nagi had said, “I-I’ll call a doctor!” and tried to run off, but Seiichi just grabbed her hand and squeezed tightly.
Then he said, “Being normal means abandoning change… staying exactly the same forever. So if you don’t want that…then you have to be something that isn’t normal. That’s why…why I…”
He was muttering words that made no sense. Nagi had already realized that he could not be saved.
She also was aware that he knew he was dying.
Her father had something he could not tell her, but was trying to get something across anyway, which was why he was talking like that—she knew this instinctively.
But even so, Nagi could not answer Seiichi.
The ambulance arrived, and he was placed on a stretcher, but by then he was already dead. The cause of death was gastric perforation leading to dissolution of the internal organs. Everything around his stomach had melted.
People gossiped that he had worked himself to death. It was like he had died in battle, and his death seemed only to increase his popularity.
Nagi herself received a number of offers from the media. She bore a heavy burden, as she was the daughter of a celebrity and was also very beautiful.
But Nagi rejected every proposal. Some of them were very persistent, but Sakakibara Gen was able to help get rid of them.
Nagi occasionally asked Gen about her father’s death.
“Sensei, did my father like his work?”
“Dunno.”
Gen was a tall, skinny man with an impish expression. At a glance, you would never guess he was a martial artist. No matter what, his first reaction was to insist that he knew nothing. It was hard to tell if he wanted her to think for herself or was just being cautious, but that was the kind of man he was.
“He always seemed like there was something driving him forward. Looking at it now, it’s easy to say it was ‘death,’ but somehow I just can’t quite make myself believe that.”
He scratched his scraggly beard. “Then what was it?”
“Hmm. I just think he was pissed off. I mean, it was like he felt, ‘Things ought to be working out okay, so why did the world turn out this way?’ After all, he was an enemy of society.”
That had been Kirima Seiichi’s self-selected nickname.
“Pissed off… that’s so simple it actually makes it harder to understand.”
“Ha ha ha. Seiichi said that to me all the time. ‘Gen, everything you say hits the truth with such accuracy it completely misses the point.’”
“But he was friendly with you. He didn’t spend all his time being angry.”
“No, well…he was never much good at meeting people and would never work particularly hard at getting along with anyone.”
“…Yeah, like Mom?”
“…Mmm, it’s complicated,” Gen sighed.
For a moment they sat in silence. Nagi was the first to break it. “Sensei,” she said.
“What?”
“Did my father think he knew everything? That he was the smartest person in the world and could understand anything? Did he ever feel like that?”
“Not sure. Certainly he was smarter than anyone else I’ve ever met…but he always insisted that I was much smarter than him. ’Course, he might have just been making fun of me. But when he learned something he didn’t know, he would always say, ‘Fascinating.’ He was never embarrassed by a lack of knowledge. And he often said that he was really an idiot, didn’t he?”
“I never knew if he really meant that.”
“Neither did I.”
…Even eight years later, Nagi never knew how serious her father had been.
***
It was early in the morning, just after dawn.
There was no one on the road running along the river. The only sound was the gentle burbling of the water. There were homes nearby, but everyone was still sleeping. The area was one small gap in the constant bustle of the world.
They had recently finished repaving the road, and the new asphalt gleamed on the surface. Footsteps were tapping along it.
They came from a man in a suit and tie. He appeared to be a dedicated worker, a middle-aged government employee. There was a plastic garbage bag in his hand.
The dark shadow of exhaustion was on his face. He must have been under a lot of stress.
He sighed loudly and hefted the garbage bag, staring at it contemplatively.
“Guess I should hurry,” he said, and tossed it onto the garbage area next to the road. It was still early, and there were only two or three other bags there—probably put there the night before in defiance of regulations.
The man turned around and headed back the way he had come.
“———!”
He stopped a few seconds later. There was someone in front of him. How long had she been there?
“…I see. So it was you?”
The man went stiff. Not only because he’d been addressed directly, but also because this person was majestic and seemed to be radiating a beautiful light.
She wore a leather jumpsuit and sturdy steel-tipped boots. It was Kirima Nagi.
The girl who people called the Fire Witch.
“Wh-who are you?”
“Who I am is not important. The problem lies with you.”
“Wh-what do you mean?”
“You’re the bad guy, aren’t you?” she said, abruptly.
The man gaped, taking a step backwards.
Nagi took a step forward. “I understand two things,” Nagi explained. “First, that you were acting alone. This was not carried out by any group. Those clothes—that suit—are an act. Even if someone sees you, they’ll just think you’re a salaryman who’s been asked to take out the trash. It keeps you from attracting suspicion. If you had help, you’d never need to do that—you could all coordinate your tasks together. This case had that air about it from the beginning, but now I’m sure of it.”
The man flinched. She was unrelenting. But he quickly coughed and tried to gain the upper hand. “Who do you think you are? You look like you’re still in high school! What are you blabbering on about, anyway? What case? What do you mean? I have no idea what this is about.”
He seemed sure that children would be cowed if he just acted arrogant enough.
“What school do you go to? Depending on what you think you’re doing, I may have to report this to your teachers!”
Certainly, the average high school student would get flustered if an adult suddenly scolded them. But Nagi was no ordinary girl.
She carried on as if he’d never spoken. “Second, you are acting calmly, in full knowledge of the possible consequences. That’s why the hand that darted into your pocket when I called out to you swiftly came out empty. If you used the gun you’re carrying you would not be able to talk your way out of this.”
She pointed at the bulge in his pocket.
“…………!” The man went pale.
“But judging from the size of that gun, it won’t be very accurate. And the tension I’m sensing from you does not suggest you’ve used it a lot. At this distance, you’ll never hit me.”
Nagi had been carefully maintaining the distance between them.
The man groaned but tried again, “S-so what are you saying? What ‘case’ are you talking about?!”
“The dead crows,” Nagi said, bluntly.
“Wh-what do those have to do…”
“The crows that died attacking each other.”
The air shifted. The awkwardness vanished, replaced with a murderous tension.
“…………”
The man was no longer putting on an act. His hand went into his pocket, and he pulled out the gun and pointed it at Nagi.
But he did not pull the trigger—he only held it steady. He asked, “How much do you know?”
“I’m absolutely sure you’ve been planting drugs disguised as garbage for the crows to eat. Everything beyond that is only supposition.”
The gun did not waver, his eyebrows did not flicker.
“Tell me,” the man hissed.
“I first thought something was strange when I noticed beak marks on the crows’ bodies. The only explanation I could come up with was that they were attacking each other. Groups of crows have some unusual habits, one of which is to execute a member that has grown ill and begun exhibiting abnormal behavior. But they would never do that where other animals would come to feed. They normally carry out such behavior somewhere safer, in seclusion from observers. But the dead crows had beak and claw marks on their bodies and bits of what appeared to be crow flesh inside their own beaks. Which means, I surmised, they went unexpectedly berserk and attacked the other crows, who subsequently fought back. Why did that happen? You know better than I do.”
“…………”
“In my autopsy, I found traces of a food additive that had an element that can only be described as a stimulant. But it was only a small amount, so something must have strengthened it…”
“Exactly!” the man yelled. “I am not scattering poison! The poison was already in the garbage!”
“And you drove the crows and rats in the town to crazed violence to let people know that?” Nagi asked quietly.
The man glared at her.
Yes—that’s what this case boiled down to. This oddly calculated plan had been lurking behind what appeared to be simply a dead crow in a garbage area.
“I did! How many crows and rats are there in the city? Millions! If they all turn violent at once, attacking people, everyone will assume it must be something in the food!”
The man shook, his voice tight with emotion.
“And when it turns out people are eating the same thing…”
There was grief in his eyes. Nagi knew what that grief meant. Those were the eyes of someone who had suffered a great loss.
“…Childhood allergies?”
This man had most likely lost a child.
“…And nobody knows! That’s why I had to make them understand! That’s why…”
“In that case, you’re finished,” Nagi interrupted.
“Mm?” The man blinked at her. “What do you mean?”
“I noticed. You were doing this because nobody knew. But now that I’ve noticed the truth behind your actions, there’s no need for you to continue.”
She looked him right in the eye.
“…………”
The man was stunned.
She walked slowly toward him.
He watched her, dazed. He only recovered and tried to shake her off when she put her hand on the gun. A moment later his body was airborne, and he landed hard on his back.
Nagi’s hand had twisted ever so slightly but with enough force to send a grown man flying. It wasn’t karate—this was an aikido move.
“Hmm,” she looked down at the gun, swiftly ejected the bullets, and then dropped it on the ground next to the man.
He’d hurt his spine and could not stand up.
“Unh…!” he groaned, tears flowing down his cheeks.
Nagi addressed him coldly, “Think about it. If all the crows go berserk, they will attack the weak. Those in the greatest danger will be babies. Is that what you want?”
“Aauuuughh!” the man wailed, sobbing in earnest. All the tension had left him. “I just…I just…”
Ignoring him, she went over to the garbage bag and cut it open with a knife. It was filled with thinly sliced meat, with bits of paper and something white scattered over it. The “feed.”
Nagi gathered that up and stuffed it in her bag, then closed the garbage bag again and put it back on the pile.
“So,” she said, turning to leave.
“W-wait!” the man called out. He was on his feet—unsteady, but upright. “Why don’t you arrest me?”
“You have not committed any crimes. No point in taking you to the police. The feed itself is probably not poisonous. Throwing it out in the garbage is not a crime unless I can prove cause and effect.”
“B-but…!”
“Yeah. You’re right. There is one person who thinks this is a crime. You. Even though you must have been the first to realize that crimes required proof.”
“…………!”
“If you still have the resolve to tell the world, then do so. You are the only one who can.” She turned her back on him again.
“…………”
The man hung his head but a moment later looked up and asked, “What is your name?”
Nagi did not turn around. “Unlike some people, I do not like giving out my name,” she said and walked away.
4
“So what was it all about?” Kentaro asked when Nagi came back to the bike where she’d left him waiting. “I basically get that this was all revenge for a baby that died when that guy fed it something with that additive in it, but why didn’t he just take it to court in the first place?”
“He was probably too sad.”
“Huh?”
“He most likely didn’t think about anything for a year. Only afterward did he start to suspect that the additive might have been the cause of the tragedy. But after that much time had passed, it would be pretty hard to get anyone to listen to him. He was too late. And the manufacturer has really good lawyers.”
“I see. So that’s why he tried this…but should we really just let him go? Won’t he go public with what he did?”
“He might.”
“And he might tell everyone about you.”
“I’m not so sure. I’ve decided I’m just going to take that risk,” Nagi said, not sounding the least bit worried.
Kentaro stared at her for a moment, but eventually he sighed. “But if he goes public there will be all kinds of panic. Like all the fuss over Teratsuki Kyoichiro, or…or those serial killings five years ago, where that Sasaki Masanori guy almost killed Suema-san.”
“…………”
Nagi grimaced. Seeing this, Kentaro sighed again.
The Sasaki Masanori incident had involved an ordinary food manufacturing company salaryman named Sasaki Masanori, who turned out to be a serial killer who had brutally murdered several young girls. Nagi’s friend Suema Kazuko, who Kentaro had met several times now, had been on the killer’s list and narrowly avoided becoming a victim.
According to the police reports, Sasaki Masanori had been found hanging from a rope; a suicide.
But from what Suema had told him, the case had actually been solved in secret by Nagi herself, when she was only fourteen.
Whenever the subject came up, Nagi became obviously annoyed and refused to talk about it.
Kentaro felt hurt by this, frustrated that Nagi wouldn’t open up to him, wouldn’t trust him.
“Maybe you’d be better off if he did tell everyone. I mean, Nagi, you don’t get any thanks for what you do.”
Nagi grinned at him. “And who was it who snuck out the back door after wrapping up the Teratsuki Kyoichiro affair?”
She put her helmet on, threw her leg over her motorcycle, and started the engine.
“Yeah, well,” Kentaro said, shrugging. “That’s your style, isn’t it?”
He was here on an ordinary bicycle. He put his helmet on, too.
***
They had plenty of time before school started, so they took a leisurely ride down the river. The morning breeze was refreshing.
I might just stick to Nagi because I like moments like this… Kentaro grinned, riding alongside Nagi.
Suddenly, Nagi hit the brakes, stopping her motorcycle.
Kentaro pulled up as well, almost toppling over, but catching his balance at the last second.
“Wh-what?! Something wrong?!” he asked, but Nagi did not answer.
She was craning her neck, staring up at a building across the road. It was a strangely shaped—an octagonal prism. Pretty big, too.
“That’s…”
“Yeah, one of the infamous Teratsuki-shi’s eccentric buildings. It was a general hospital. Can’t recall if it was prefectural or city, though,” Kentaro said, pushing his bike back in her direction.
“It’s…still there?” Nagi murmured.
“Yeah. It closed some time ago, but…all the properties he was involved with have proved really hard to dispose of. It must be slated for demolition soon. The creditors must own it by now.”
“…………”
Nagi stared up at it a moment longer and then abruptly wheeled her motorcycle around and sped off toward the structure.
Kentaro was baffled by her behavior but followed her anyway.
***
Chain link fences with “No Trespassing” signs surrounded the building, but Nagi went right on in, and Kentaro followed, shaking his head.
“Ew, what a dump…” he said, as he stepped inside.
The interior was heavily deteriorated. Bed frames were piled high in the lobby, dust balls heaped on them like fluffy stuffed animals. The tiles on the floor were no longer attached and shifted underfoot. Kentaro felt like he was walking on dead insects.
“Yuck. Nagi, what the hell are we doing here?”
Nagi ignored him, walking straight ahead. Judging from her lack of hesitation, she knew this place pretty well.
Oh! Maybe…
He’d heard Nagi had been sick in junior high and spent a long time in the hospital. Maybe this was her hospital.
Lots of memories, then?
Nagi stepped out into the open space in the center of the building.
Kentaro heard her gasp and poked his head out the door.
“Ah!” he yelped.
There was a shock of green. It was mostly weeds, but the leaves were lush, the white and yellow flowers bright, and he felt like they had stepped into a tropical paradise.
“Wow,” Kentaro said, moving out into the garden and looking up.
It was open all the way to the top, and there were mirrors placed along the walls, reflecting light down to the bottom.
“…I see. This building’s most eccentric feature. Drab on the outside, green on the inside…”
Of course, this had once been a proper, well-maintained garden. The trees must have been hauled away when the hospital closed. But the environment remained, and the garden had stayed alive.
“Amazing, isn’t it, Nagi…?” Kentaro said, turning toward her, and trailing off mid-thought.
Nagi was crying. Her eyes were wide and her lips trembling, staring at the garden as tears flowed.
“‘It’s very impressive,’” she whispered, as if quoting someone else.
Kentaro was stunned. He could only stand and stare.
Nagi walked unsteadily away and sat down on an overgrown bench. She hung her head, muttering to herself.
She seemed oddly childlike, and Kentaro was starting to get worried. “Um,” he said, hesitantly.
“What do you want to be?” Nagi suddenly asked.
“Eh?”
“In the future, what do you want to be?” she asked, not looking up.
“Wh-where’d that come from?”
“What do you think will become of me? What do you think I should be?” she muttered, emotionless.
“What will… aren’t you already a hero?”
“Can I really? Can I really be one?”
“Well, you already…”
“‘You should go for it,’ I said. How thoughtless of me.” Nagi smiled faintly, and fell silent.
Her shoulders looked so thin, so frail that Kentaro was suddenly reminded that the Fire Witch was just a high school girl.
“…I don’t really know,” Kentaro said, hesitantly. “But I think if anyone can do it, you can. I’m sure you will. And because I think that, I’m trying to…”
Help, he almost said but then hesitated. He was suddenly not sure that what he was doing was useful to her. It was fully possible he was just getting in her way, dragging her back.
“So, um…”
“…………”
Kentaro stood helplessly in front of Nagi. She said nothing for a long time, and then abruptly—
“Think about it,” she said. “Think about whether I can be one.”
“…………” Kentaro didn’t even think it worth thinking about, but she seemed so earnest that he said, “…Okay, I will.”
Nagi reached up and wiped away her tears. When she looked up she was herself again.
“Thanks,” she said, awkwardly.
Above their heads, the mirrors glittered, reflecting the light of the rising sun.
“Style” closed.